“As a method of social production, as well as social reproduction, standardized testing has had serious cultural implications, not the least of which has been the eternal question of American identity. Consistent with notions of American identity, standardized testing, as an opposition to a cultural other, represents the normalization of whiteness, richness, and maleness.”-Andrew Hartman

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”-Toni Morrison

We talk about standardized testing as if we don’t really understand what it is.

The federal government still requires all students in 3-8th grade and once in high school to take standardized tests.

But these assessments are graded on a curve. A certain amount of students are at the bottom, a certain amount are at the top, and most are clustered in the middle. This would be true if you were testing all geniuses or all people with traumatic brain injuries.

It doesn’t matter how smart your test takers are. There will always be this bell curve distribution. That’s how the tests are designed. So to talk about raising test scores is nonsensical. You can raise scores at school A or School B, but the total set of all test takers will always be the same. And some students will always fail.

But that isn’t even the worst part.

Standardization, itself, has certain consequences. We seem to have forgotten what the term even means. It’s defined as the act of evaluating someone or something by reference to a standard.

This socket wrench is a good socket wrench because it most closely resembles some ideal socket wrench. This McDonald’s Big Mac is good because it resembles the ideal McDonald’s Big Mac.

That’s what we’re doing to people – children in fact. We’re evaluating them based on their resemblance to some ideal definition of what a child should know and what a child should be.

But children are not socket wrenches nor are they Big Macs. It is not so easy to reduce them to their component parts and say this is good and that is bad.

But when you define a standard, an ideal, you make certain choices – you privilege some attributes and denigrate others. Since the people creating the tests are almost exclusively upper middle class white people, it should come as no surprise that that is the measure by which they assess success.

We’ve known this for almost a century. Standardized tests do a poor job of assessing intelligence or knowledge. Those things are too complex and the tests are too simple. If you’re evaluating something equally simple like basic addition and subtraction, these tests can work alright. But if you’re trying to get at something complex like critical thinking or creativity, they end up doing little more than prizing the way some people think and not others. In short, they elevate the thought processes most associated with rich white kids.

It doesn’t mean poor and/or black children are any less intelligent. It just means rich white kids have the things for which the test designers are looking. Some of this is due to economic factors like greater access to private tutoring, books in the home, parents with more time to read to their kids, coming to school healthy and more focused. However, a large portion is due to the very act of taking tests that are created to reflect white upper class values and norms.

Think about it. Almost all the questions are field tested before they become a permanent part of the exam. Students are given a question that doesn’t count to their final score, but test makers tabulate how many kids get it right or wrong. So when most white kids answer a field tested question correctly and most black kids get it wrong, it still becomes a permanent test question because there are so few blacks relative to whites. Maybe it’s a question that references sun tan lotion, something with which darker skinned people don’t have as much experience. Imagine if a question referencing the hair care practices of black people became a test item. White people would have difficulty with it because they can’t easily relate. But the field testing process doesn’t allow that because it normalizes whiteness.

So black kids stumble while white kids have an easier time. We even have a name for it: the racial proficiency gap.

That’s right. You cannot have such obvious, historical problems perpetuated year-after-year, decade-after-decade, and still think they are mere unintended consequences.

This is how the system was designed to work. This is how it’s always been designed to work.

If you were going to create a racist and classist school system from scratch, what would you do? How would you go about it?

You’d need the lower classes to have SOME mediocre education so they are able to do the menial work that keeps society running. But only so much. Education as a social ladder is all well and good as propaganda. But you don’t want that ladder to lead out of the basement for more than a few.

You need a biased sorting mechanism – something that allows you to put students into privileged and unprivileged categories but that will look to all the world like it was doing so fairly. It would have to appear like you were choosing students based on merit.

You’d need something like standardized test scores.

This is how these assessments have functioned from their very beginnings.

When Carl Brigham and Robert Yerkes, U.S. Army psychologists during WWI, designed the alpha and beta intelligence tests to determine which soldiers deserved to be officers, they were creating a pseudoscientific justification for white privilege. They used biased and unfair assessments to “prove” that rich white folks were best suited to give orders, and the rest of us belonged in the trenches.

“We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed,” wrote Yerkes.

THIS is the basis of standardized testing.

After the war, Brigham took the same principles to create the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T. – in principle the same exam still taken by 2.1 million teenagers every year to ensure they get into their chosen college.

The test was further refined by fellow eugenicist Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Together these three men created the foundations for the modern field of standardized testing. And make no mistake – its axiomatic principle is still that some races are genetically superior and others are inferior.

“A low level of intelligence is very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… They constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”

This information is not secret. It is not kept under lock and key in some hidden military base somewhere. It’s accessible to anyone with Internet access or a library card.
We ignore it, because otherwise it would destabilize the current power structure – the corporate education policies that drive school practices in our country. We close our eyes and pretend it isn’t happening.

But it is.

“Standardized tests are the last form of legalized discrimination in the US,” said Education and Psychology Prof. Phil Harris.

With them you can give rich and middle class whites every advantage while withholding the same from students of color. And we don’t call it racism or classism because we pretend the whites earned their privileges by their test scores.

And when you have a teacher shortage in these poor urban neighborhoods, you can use that to justify further deprivations. Instead of teachers with 4-year education degrees, you can hire lightly trained Teach for America temps – college grads who’ve taken no coursework in education beyond a six weeks cram session.

And if the parents of these children complain, you can open charter schools to pull a quick bait and switch. Make them feel like they have a choice when really you’re pulling the rug out from under them. You provide them with a school with none of the safeguards of a traditional public institution – no elected school board, no transparency on how tax dollars are spent, little oversight, a right to refuse any student they wish, etc. And when the school goes belly up, these kids will be pushed back to their former traditional public school that has had to make due with less funding and now can provide even fewer services than it could before students jumped ship.

Using standardized test scores to judge not just students but whole schools, you can destabilize the entire system of public education. Charter schools and traditional public schools fight over ever-dwindling funding, one required to prove everything it does, the other able to do whatever it wants until it closes with little to no consequences for charter operators who take the money and run.

The US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board that we can’t have “separate but equal” schools because when they’re separate, they’re rarely equal. But somehow that doesn’t apply to charter schools.

Oh! And let’s not forget setting “high academic standards” while all this is going on. They throw out everything that’s been working and come up with a Common Core of knowledge that all kids need to learn. Don’t include black and brown history, culture or the arts – just the stuff the business community thinks is valuable because they know so much about what’s really important in life. And have the whole thing written up by non-educators and non-psychologists and don’t bother testing it out to make sure it works.

Your rich white kids will have no problem jumping through these hoops. But your poor black and brown kids will stumble and fall – just as planned.

This is what has become of our public schools.

This is corporate education reform.

This is our racist, classist school system.

And it’s all based on standardized testing – a perfectly legal system of normalizing rich whiteness.

Thank you for this. I was just telling my colleagues that I believe that we are committing malpractice. It is not just the tests, it is all of the test prep. Everything that we do in education now is test prep.

No doubt human beings can be biased – especially when they’re involved in a practice that is designed to be biased from the very start. I try very hard every day to be as fair as possible to my students, but I know I fail sometimes. But at least I’m aware of it and keep trying.

It appears that we are left with a choice. We can use standardized tests with there history of racial bias to identify students for gifted programs or we can drop the tests and use the even more racially biased teacher recommendations.

I don’t know why you assume teachers are more racially biased than the tests that were created to be biased and have proven to continue to be biased time and again. The best tool we have to help students is still the teachers. Yes, we can do things to help teachers avoid bias. We can, for instance, give them cultural sensitivity training. But we need to support the people on the ground not some systemic mechanism that has never been trustworthy. And if you disagree, I don’t trust you – after all, you’re only a teachingeconomist. (See what I did there?)

My post was not about making an assumption that teachers were more racially biased than the tests, it provided evidence that teachers were more racially biased than the tests. Did you read the link?

The evidence is pretty clear. When the country used a standardized test to determine if a student should be considered for gifted instruction, the percentage of students of color that were deemed candidates for gifted instruction tripled. When, because of budget cutbacks, the county went back to the old system of having teachers and parents recommend students be considered for gifted programs, the percentage of students of color were deemed candidates for gifted instruction fell by two thirds, back to the original levels.

Teachingeconomist, the article you mentioned detailed one study in one Florida county, Broward. That is not nearly enough data to generalize for the entire country. However, there is evidence nationwide (worldwide even) to support the widespread existence of standardized testing bias. Second, the test only identified children who were suitable for gifted classes. It was not high stakes nor was it similar to federally mandated annual testing. Third, they replaced the test that increased the percentage of minorities in advanced classes with another one that did not. That just goes to show that these tests are not a panacea – they can be biased, too. In fact, the second test is much more similar to the tests children take at federal mandate. In short, this is not evidence that tests are more impartial than teachers, as you claim. It is partial evidence that some tests may be better than others. Even if we found the perfect test to sort students, we would need to do something about reducing racial bias among teachers, parents, school boards, politicians and teaching economists. That is the real goal.

It’s poverty’s fault as the article says–but standardized testing makes it worse. All the stress can bias teachers who sigh every time an English langauge Learner walks in their room because teachers today face insurmountable challenges in differentiating for these learners in our highly-standardized educational climate. Most good teachers are not inherently biased unless we’re frustrated at being pushed through rigid, standardized CCSS pacing guides with no time to slow down for ELLs or struggling readers –lest we not be prepared for the PARCC assessment. In race-to-the-top states standardized assessments mean standardized (not differentiated) curriculum that disadvantages struggling learners.

Yes, before NAEP started publishing comparisons of states in 1992, NCLB and “Race to the Top” in the 2000s, and ESSA now. … Before high-stakes tests, teachers didn’t feel the brunt of value-added scores hurting their professional evaluations in a way that biased them against ELLs and other students (specifically students of poverty with low literacy) who need differentiated instruction teacher’s can’t offer in our highly standardized educational climate.

Your blog arrived at just the right moment. I will be testifying at four meetings this week, all of which will be considering our TFA/Chief for Change Superintendent’s (John White) plan for ESSA accountability. I have been saying for years that it’s the test stupid to no avail. The strategy to make “reform” and its accountability system complex and impossible to understand, so that the single person controlling it can produce the results he wants, works. Ironically, the simple solution to “fix” it is to eliminate its foundation – the high stakes standardized assessment.

If you don’t mind, I am shortening your blog to 3 minutes with attribution and presenting it to all four groups as testimony. Thanks!

Great blog post. (FYI, you have a typo towards the end – There is a sentence that says “And when the school goes belly up, these kids will be pushed back to their former traditional public school that has had to make due with less funding and now can provide even fewer services than it could before students jumped ship.” I think you mean to say “has had to make do”…)

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